Austin-based Microventures, the crowdfunding-meets-venture-capital startup founded by Bill Clark, has made another investment, this time in San Francisco-based social commerce firm Ribbon. Ribbon announced a $1.6M funding for its service, a social commerce platform which lets users sell products and accept payments from the web, Facebook, and other social sites. The funding came from Draper Associates, (More info...)

ShopSavvy Enhances Barcode Scanning, Pricing Comparison AppShopSavvy, the developer of the mobile pricing comparison and price checking application, has just pushed out a big update to the firm's app software, the company said today. The developer of mobile apps makes software which lets users scan a barcode, and immediately get pricing comparisons drawn from both online and nearby stores. ShopSavvy said the new update includes new, full screen product photos, demo videos, and community reviews; the company (More info...)

Dell Gets Big Storage Win In JapanRound Rock-based Dell is reporting today that it has scored a big customer win in Japan, with the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). Dell said that JAIST will be using its Dell Compellant arrays, in a three petabyte storage deployment. Dell said the new storage arays will be deployed to store research data for students and researchers. Financial details of the win were not announced.

Austin-based data analytics software provider Continuum Analytics has scored $3M in research funding, the company said Tuesday, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Continuum, which develops Python-based data analytics software and services, said the new funding will go towards development of open source tools for big data processing, analysis, and visualization for DARPA, which it says will be useful for the interactive ex (More info...)